


Lay Your Sleeping Head Human on My Faithless Arm

by kenaz



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: M/M, Yuletide 2008
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-20
Updated: 2008-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-09 20:53:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/91500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kenaz/pseuds/kenaz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are times," Alec said, peeling back the corner of the blackout curtain to peer outside, "that I imagine I'll miss these awful things when this blasted war is over."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lay Your Sleeping Head Human on My Faithless Arm

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tetsubinatu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tetsubinatu/gifts).



Originally written for tetsubinatu, Yuletide 2008. In the interest of complete disclosure, I'll acknowledge having tweaked a couple of words since it was posted to the Yuletide archive. While it stands alone, it could also be read as a sort of precursor to [Always: Time Will Bring Their Hour](http://archiveofourown.org/works/91498). The title, as one astute reader has already noted, comes from the poem [Lullaby](http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15542) by W.H. Auden.

 

 

 

 

_Lay your sleeping head, my love,_  
Human on my faithless arm;  
Time and fevers burn away  
Individual beauty from  
Thoughtful children, and the grave  
Proves the child ephemeral:  
But in my arms till break of day  
Let the living creature lie,  
Mortal, guilty, but to me  
The entirely beautiful.  


"There are times," Alec said, peeling back the corner of the blackout curtain to peer outside, "that I imagine I'll miss these awful things when this blasted war is over." He tacked it back into place, enveloping the room once again in comfortable darkness. He reached across Ralph's chest and felt blindly on the nightstand for a cigarette.

Behind the blackouts, time passed differently, marked by ellipses rather than by minutes or hours, and hanging there in the liminal space between boredom and fear was the wild sense of possibility: anything could happen, anything at all. Concomitant with that was the irresponsible expectation that because anything could happen, something must. All over Bridstow, cocooned away in artificial darkness, how many men and women had found the means to mitigate their little sorrows?

Acrid sulfur punctuated the brief flare of the match. Ralph roused himself slowly, pushing himself back to lean against the headboard. Alec regarded him fondly, the way one regarded a photograph of an old acquaintance; his light hair was gently mussed, and a small love bite stood out on his collarbone. It wasn't particularly noticeable unless one was looking for such things.

"You'll have the devil to pay when Bunny sees that."

He had asked Ralph more than once what-- aside from the man's physical charms, which were self-evident-- could possibly had drawn him, but Ralph was nothing if not discreet.

It would be disloyal, he had said, to speak out of turn. But Alec could hardly imagine Bunny being loyal to Ralph unless it suited him to be so; Bunny's loyalties were never in question, because they were unwaveringly centered on himself alone.

Ralph drew the cigarette out of Alec's fingers with his good hand. He had taken off his glove at Alec's insistence-- he was a doctor, he had gently protested, and it wasn't the sort of thing he hadn't seen before-- but Ralph kept the mangled fingers cautiously obscured by the bed linens, a reminder of intimacies irretrievably lost.

"You've a devil of your own to worry about," Ralph replied on the exhale, words spooling out with the smoke. "All things being equal, I prefer mine to yours. At least he won't be sniffing about the sheets like a cat and then threatening to hang himself with them."

Alec slumped back against the pillow, not pleased to be reminded of what inevitably awaited him. "All the same...There must be someone more suitable."

"Physician, heal thyself," Ralph returned, his lip quirking with a jaded, ironical expression that made Alec profoundly sad.

Alec thought of Sandy, his pink and perpetually tear-stained cheeks, then gave a little laugh: "I suppose you're right. I've not a leg to stand on." Yet despite Ralph's preference, he himself would take Sandy's predictable histrionics over Bunny's unpredictable subtlety; a face-full of scalding despair was more palatable to him than a cold knife in the back.

Ralph swung his legs over the side of the bed, and Alec took that as his cue to rise and sort his clothes out from the careless pile on the floor. He sniffed experimentally at his collar, relieved that Ralph wasn't one for cologne.

"You'll come round to ours soon, I hope?" Ralph had got up to brush his teeth, and the rush of water from the spigot forced Alec to repeat himself. "My birthday's in a fortnight and Sandy intends to make much of it. He'd like it if you came."

Ralph regarded him wryly from the doorway, a fleck of dentifrice still clinging to the corner of his mouth. "Would he?"

"No," Alec chuckled, rubbing his hand tiredly across his eyes. It seemed, of a sudden, very late. "But I would."

"Might do," Ralph said noncommittally, and Alec knew then that he had no intention of coming. It wasn't much of a disappointment; he had rather expected it. He was almost surprised Ralph hadn't declined outright.

He looked to the door with a small measure of regret. Not for Ralph; that was a closed chapter. But beyond the darkness of the bedroom, normal time would reassert itself, and with it would come the constraints of mundane expectation. When Ralph pulled aside the heavy curtains, the light was sharp as a lance. Time to get on with things, then.

"Well, off I go," Alec said, swatting Ralph playfully, prepared to show himself out. The shadows had resumed their perpetual station in the hollows of Ralph's eyes, and the weight of whatever unspoken burden he carried settled back upon his shoulders like a mantle of lead, and there was nothing for it but to send him back into the fray.

"Perhaps I'll see you at the party." It was a quotidian thing to say, suitable for the daylight that now flooded the room.

Ralph smiled a not altogether insincere smile. "Perhaps."

Outside, in the sunlight, the rhythms of life rattled on blandly, a desultory rumble of obligations and necessities. Alec walked slowly, taking a roundabout and inefficient route, unwilling to take up again the reins of responsibility quite yet. He glanced briefly at his watch and saw that it was already half-five; night would fall soon enough-- the real one, not the ersatz pitch behind the blackouts that justified the painful indignities brought by faithless lovers, and the trifling nuisances brought by the ill-chosen ones.

It wasn't quite the same, Alec knew, but it would do.


End file.
